why on earth would you edit an spfile, open it up and you see loads of junk at the top - isnt that enough to at least think about what you are doing
Yes it contains junks but it also coantains relevent parameters and their values (somewhere doen below)
copy--> paste



I'm just wondering if you could recreate it manually using info from the alert log from the last time the database was started up, it should list all the non default parameters.
this also a good idea

the best is, of course , if still have the init.ora...